Tag: socialbusiness

Summary: This year’s SBC was primarily about change. Once in a while you actually got the feeling of being at a Human Resources conference. But as fairy dust there were a couple of presentations that stood out because they provided a new angle on a couple of things. Telenor reported on their experience with Facebook@Work. Jen Regruth Crites (@jen_k_crites) talked about actually “branding” a new IT solution. Laurence Fourcade from Kelios gave a striking presentation on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in the Digital Workplace. Europa-Park shared the insight how social connects the “unconnected” bees with a new software called “BeeKeeper”. And I am only mentioning a product here, because I really like a few aspects of their approach because of my work for the industrial manufacturing industry…and without further ado, here we go:

We knew it for some time. Finally everyone is acting on it.

Let me keep this short and crisp: “social” finally got its emphasis in real life. The days of IT-driven initiatives seem to be over for good. Literally everyone on stage made it clear that without properly orchestrating the symphony of change management, SBC (or business IT in general) initiatives simply are destined to fail.

Leadership needs to believe in and sponsor the efforts

Senior and middle management has to play an active role in the process

People have to be guided and taken on the journey in order to allow the new ways of working to really take effect

And the journey of change isn’t one of “campaigns” and “visionary promises” anymore. It’s about tangible value and a close connection to what people need help with. It’s about empowerment and allowing talent to really contribute its value to what the organisation wants to achieve.

All success stories that were presented this year showed, how essential the three bullets above were. Henry Haijes from ABM AMRO even added a slight twist to the culture/strategy quote from Peter Drucker:

“Influential power is eating organisation power” says Harry from ABN AMRO at #wcsocbiz – love the variation of the culture quote 🙂

Same goes for driving change throughout the entire organisation. Paul from the European Commission actually have a really compelling presentation on what it means to make sure that everyone is on board.

1. Facebook@Work at Telenor

John Alphonse gave a pretty compelling presentation about their “roll-out” of Facebook@Work. For me the story was particularly exciting because it was literally the first company to report on their experience. Essence: it seems to work really well after some serious ramp-up efforts.

x-silo insight facilitated by FB@Work

State of “collaboration” at Telenor

“Every employee should be part of each box” John said at the conference

After Facebook worked very(!) closely with Telenor to get all set-up for enterprise readiness and prepare of an official data security audit, an audit Telenor & FB passed in attempt #1, which is probably one of the most impressive things I took home from Berlin. Not though, that FB passed the test impressed me here, but actually the fact that FB actively worked with Telenor and used their help and advise to gear up for the requirements of the enterprise world.

The 2nd interesting angle John reported on was, that FB@Work actually started in the world of Telenor’s Shadow IT. You know Shadow IT: it’s what the official IT department cannot keep up with on people’s laptops, tablets and smartphones (…long live the cloud). Telenor, however, has decided that they want to be inspired by their Shadow IT and that they will keep investigating new options for business solutions that have been “tried” by voluntary guinea pigs.

As part of my World Café Hans Dekker (@hansdekker) from IKEA even suggested that it makes total sense to actually actively encourage Shadow IT. He believes that allocating accountability to people and putting them in charge of finding new and better options outside the standard governance is rather an opportunity than a threat. Quite frankly: I think he’s spot on. With a certain set of reasonable rules this might actually be the solution to one of the key challenges of IT organisations: herding cats.

Thirdly John added a little detail: communication, exchange & networking (formal, informal, project) happens in FB@Work – Documents are managed in SharePoint. Literally all vendors that were mentioned had their short coming in document handling. So Telenor employees were simply encouraged to post links to SP in the FB conversations:

In Facebook@Work the main part of conversations happens in (open & closed) groups – in contrary to the private version, in which the majority of posts are in the public/main feed.

I wonder if Microsoft ever considers the fact that they seem to stay (very) dominant in the “enterprise information management” part and that they should leave the field of “social glue” to the ones that know the real deal. However, after still not 100% delivering on a Yammer vision, maybe the acquisition of LinkedIn could add some momentum here. Who knows. Time will tell…

2. The P&G heritage: branding as a success driver for IT tool roll-outs

Jen Regruth Crites (@jen_k_crites) reported on how her Procter & Gamble learnings helped to support the roll out of a new IT tool. She simply asked the question: if a brand helps commercial organisations to differentiate and emphasise value, why shouldn’t IT departments apply this to delivering their “product” to employees. Jen answered that question with a striking presentation on how a well branded IT tool roll-out can make an impact: 6 months in the following KPI pretty much speak for itself:

54% of users recall the brand (starting from 3%)

375k EUR savings

83% Net Promotor Score

Active requests for MORE to the IT department

So FrieslandCampina (her gig at the time of the project) actually applied the Marketing 101 by the text book and even came up with a claim for the new UCC service:

Keolis really approached the submission of documents to the intranet from a SEO driven angle and they tried to drive awareness for content IMPACT. For each item readers (online consumption) and downloads are displayed. Doing this actually can help editors or content owners to understand if the information provided has any reach (or relevance) within the organisation. You could even go as far as “x readers, no downloads” could stand for “na, this isn’t what I was looking for” from a searching point of view. Combined with the search query we’d enter a complete new game of content relevance and quality management.

Laurence made it clear as well that the UX for the upload interface is essential to the success of the approach. Thereby she made clear, that AGAIN the people are in the centre of all thinking, because an easy and intuitive upload mechanism that enforces SEO relevant aspects has to be user centric. Thereby the user (here the editor) is clearly the success factor that needs to be catered to.

The fact that I had at least 3 other in-depth conversations on Enterprise Search and search in general at the conference shows that it’s still one of THE subjects companies are struggling with. And I am still flabbergasted by Estée Lauder’s guts to actually run a “re-work” of their search index…from scratch. It’s one of the presentations that will stick to my mind for quite some time.

4. Keeping the bees involved…

I’ve always enjoyed working for industrial manufacturing clients. To guide organisations that usually perceive digital transformation as the next SAP roll-out into the world and value of information and knowledge work is very rewarding… However, there is one key challenge that still hasn’t been addressed properly: how do we keep the blue collar work force involved? They don’t have a PC or a user account. They often don’ even have an e-mail address. Two things the majority of current solution require (as an either or) to actually get someone on-boarded to the party.

Anselm Müller from the Europa Park theme parks presented their approach to keeping the bees connected with a new software called “Beekeeper“. Authentication does not go through AD or similar services. It’s rather a “sign up” service, which gives full control over content and access to the maintaining organisation. In it’s core it’s a social network with streams, groups and all.

The adoption of employees at Europa Park confirms the expectations and now the organisation even considers to gradually say “goodbye” to its conventional intranet. I cannot wait for that success story to hit a stage…

***

So far for my little digest. The summary of my World Café session on “driving people and corporate value with the Digital Workplace” will follow soon. So, stay tuned…

Like this:

Summary: Berlin, October 1st and 2nd 2015. The European practitioners for modern intranets, social business collaboration and the Digital Workplace gathered in Berlin to exchange on their experience and share insight & learning. As part of the conference I had the opportunity to host a “World Café” session on stakeholder management. This article captures the essence of our discussion.

The framing of the session

I used a little drawing to introduce my personal learning from the past years in the field. From my experience the key layout of stakeholders exists on three levels:

It’s 2015 and the top management (c-level, board room) have bought into the fact that companies have to break up silos. Globalisation is reality and collaboration/communication has to bridge geographical and functional distance. Digital Business Agility (read about this in one of my previous posts) is essential in highly competitive markets.

The people in business operations drive from bottom up. They have a solid understanding on how connectedness and collaboration can improve business success. They are desperate for a more integrated world, improved information management and the ability to work independent from time, place or device – no matter if Generation Y or Silver Surfer.

Squeezed in-between is the middle management. They either get left out in the process from “let’s get connected” to “this is the new connected world” or they are not measured based on the new paradigms. Middle management happens in Excel and PowerPoint, in an abstraction of the real world and represents the “channel” TO the top management. In addition to that it’s a rough world. It’s competitive and not everyone (aka only a very very few) are willing to take risk and accountability for change. They are the ones that we have to really care for. They get caught in politics, games and objective struggles. “What’s in for me” gets more and more important on this particular level in the stakeholder map.

This will become particularly important if our ambition is to further increase the work and business criticality of intranet, Digital Workplace. Then accountability and governance have to be with the middle management. They will be in charge of making it work for the organisation. Therefore we need have to have middle management on board as of day one and make it theirs.

The conversation’s essence

Everyone agreed that more time has to be invested in understanding the real stakeholder map and how they stand with regards to the subject (supporter, promoter, opponent, neutral and/or allies)
Finding the right “value proposition” for the various stakeholder functions is key to get them on board and keep them on along the entire journey.

Executives and top management have to adjust success measurement and KPI to make “connectedness” and “networking of knowledge and people” part of the actual middle management scope of work. The fact that effectiveness will provide competitive edge has to start trumping the “just get it done” attitude.

We have to accept the fact that “business ownership” doesn’t come through a title when it comes to stakeholders for the Digital Workplace. A director is not in the middle of things. Field managers are. They are the ones that primarily seek enablement and support from digital services. We need to have them on board to ensure that “user centricity” is built into the project.

If you have opponents or “disbelievers” in the stakeholder center, get them close to you. Give them a key role, a key stake and the opportunity to shine with the project. Thereby you turn them through pure opportunism…and it’s WIN/WIN.

Pursuing something that has an impact through work criticality will lead to politics. And politics. And politics. Be prepared and don’t expect “yes” to mean “yes” or “I am in” to stand for “I will throw all necessary resource at you”. The future Digital Workplace is cultural and corporate change…and it’s political.

The conversation cards & transcript

We’ve collected a lot of angles on stakeholder management. Below the little moderation wall you can find a (more or less) transcript from the cards collected during the sessions (5 groups attended, approx. 50 participants in total).

Like this:

Summary: I’ve spent the last 1.5 days with Digital Workplace practitioners and thought leaders discussing the connected enterprise and social media inspired ways of working. Once again I have left the venue inspired and with a lot of food for thought. However, I have to admit that there is a struggle with the transition to the next phase. Various conversations at the conference have confirmed this impression. We have definitely left the age of “technology driven” change (was there one…like ever?). Now we seem to be stuck in the phase of “awareness for the real drivers” of management buy-in, business value and strong business logic integration. Don’t get me wrong: there is momentum and the whole things feels like getting out of a really really tight jumper…you’re just waiting to finally pull it over your head and go: YEAH! AIR TO BREATHE!

My last two days were full of inspiration. A lot of it. In addition to the joy of listening to another of Jane McConnel’s (@netjmc) inspirational talks and her insight from her Digital Workplace research I finally had the honour of listening to one of Dion Hinchcliff’s (@dhinchcliffe) keynote. The two field (knowledge) heavy weights were complemented by practice and vendor presentations. Bayer Material Science’s CIO Laurie Miller’s (@lauriemiller44) presentation definitely stood out and her angle on connected experts has provided a new and strong value proposition to me that will come in handy in future conversations.

So let me start with this new value proposition as one of my key take aways:

The Personal Brand. Inside an Organization. Built on Expertise & Experience.

This one has struck me in a way that it’s quite annoying because it’s so obvious. Any industry that is in its core driven by IP (intellectual property) lives (sometimes even exclusively) of its talent. Looking back into my past in advertising in marketing I remember that client’s moved with their creative counterparts from agency to agency. About professional service firms (aka consultancies) we say that it’s “people business”. If expertise counts you don’t hire the firm, you hire (or rather borrow) the person and you will move the firm if the person moves, too From a corporate HR angle I really agree to the statement that “you don’t leave companies, you leave managers” – and they become known if it starts being a trend.

Athletes are brands due to their physical capabilities and performance. From a recent conversation I know that those brands are worth billions and nurture entire industries.

With the introduction of “social” to the mechanics of communication, collaboration & information flow within organizations we have changed the perspective from “outside” to “inside”. From a branding perspective we could – or actually should! – do the same thing when it comes to people brands.

As much as I believe that companies should measure collaborative success and joint value creation I also think (since today) that it would make sense to lead people towards creating their personal brand. Leading in terms of creating awareness, enablement and formal measurement, if we want to put the real beef to the bone.

If companies and their people managers are able to drive the profiling of high performers or subject matter wizards, we solve so many issues at the same time:

Capturing of intellectual assets and exposure to the organisation

Refinement and sharpening of people profiles as the foundation for relevance based delivery of information & communication

Improved retrieval of expert profiles (automated or manually)

My journey to find stakeholders and ambassadors for the “personal branding” business case starts today!

Social vs. Enterprise Collaboration

To be honest: I haven’t put much thought towards trying to actually separate the two. My strong belief is, that the fundamental business case (the organisational one) lies in the enablement of individuals and teams to successfully execute on core business processes and navigate through the company’s business logic. Well… with reference to the above I actually see the case for Social Collaboration as a separate thing. It derives from Enterprise Collaboration (EC) and is some kind of “spin off”. However, it’s not a layer but rather the glue between the protagonists of EC (and I am explicitly not calling it “foam” for the ones that were in Paris…).

Social Collaboration (SC) is a subject that has to be handled carefully because it’s not the free pass for the corporate Facebook (I’m not too keen to see it “at work” by the way) or the “social context will connect the dots” wild card. It will be the real art to make SC less “business” and more “people” but still have it sit on the same strong foundation (aka IA/taxonomy) and have a strong connection to the EC side of things in order to use assets that derive from SC in the context of the core business logic with ease (aka without media or UX break). Furthermore it has to be ensured that actual assets (e.g. documents) aren’t suddenly stored all over the place. This thought is definitely inspired by the slide @lauriemiller44 put up but maybe not 100% in-line with the content…

Anyway, this angle is food for thought for me…and I wanted to share it even though I haven’t digested it completely. Maybe someone else has something to share here as well.

Collaboration needs a meaning

@dhinchcliffe’s keynote was really inspiring and I could see so many things in there that I have stumbled across myself. What stood out for me was his recommendation to connect initiatives to business functions that can find value in the new ways of working quickly. (Right side of the following slide)

Essentially because the new opportunities that social and enterprise collaboration provide suddenly enable us to capture and enable things digitally that so far only existed outside of office, ERP and BPM.

To some extend this goes hand in hand with the search for purpose when it comes to “less formal” collaboration in the virtual space. @Judith_Will from BNP/Paribas Cardiff already said it in Berlin in 2014 at the INTRAnet.Reloaded conference: “What’s the project of your community?” I share her opinion that collaboration just for the collaboration’s sake doesn’t have much future in organisations that want to see some beef to the bone and ROI on their business productivity investments.

Another slide that Dion put up showed the potential evolution of collaboration (services) along the people or protagonist perspective:

It reminded me of one of my core (evangelizing) messages of the past few years. Because I believe that a lot of companies have jumped the stage of enabling “people with shared goals” in their approach towards the new ways of working. Inspired by impact and performance of Social Media in the outside world a lot of companies kicked of their enterprise 2.0 endeavors by connecting “people with shared interest & passion”.

That “interest & passion” however, weren’t the primary drivers for the majority’s work day was kind of forgotten in the process. I believe that this has been one of the reasons that enterprise 2.0 or social business initiatives haven’t delivered the substance in business impact.

A more general reflection on the content

Common denominators of almost all presentations – practitioner’s as well as vendor’s – were the following subjects:

Without executive buy-in enterprise 2.0 will be going nowhere.

We need change agents and ambassadors to drive and implement change.

Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a technology discussion. (Uhm…reality check: yes it is. In the end it always is. We just have to make sure that we have clarified the “why” and “what” before the CTO lets the “how” out of the box…pun intended).

We need to nurture conversation and exchange across silos and we need to break up closed space thinking.

So this leaves me with a major question:

What is preventing the actual digital transformation?

It was @dhinchcliffe again who might have put one essential piece to the puzzle on the screen: the transformation of business functions (and their processes) processes is essential in the enablement of the connected enterprises we’re so desperately seeking for.

A lot of the guidance is more or less “disruptive” to the old world. It could definitely create tension, competition and awareness for change. So my question is: who is the actual stakeholder group that we have to form a coalition with in order to drive the internal transformation and introduce disruption to what we know as “established and working”?

So I am closing this article with a simple proposal:

With social collaboration and enterprise 2.0 initiatives we intend to nurture the corporate dialogue and connect experts and expertise more effectively. Let’s find a way to get the stakeholders of the actual digital transformation into a conversation to speed up the process until the next conference…

Starting Point

McKinsey says:The age of experimentation with digital is over. (…)To succeed, management teams need to move beyond vague statements of intent and focus on “hard wiring” digital into their organization’s structures, processes, systems, and incentives.

I have experienced the same over the past year. No matter which industry, size or mode of operations, almost all companies are done with their experiments on community building, social networks and virtual teamwork. Vision statements of “fully connected enterprises” and the “one big committed family approach” become less and less. They are replaced by initiatives going after business productivity, effectiveness and growth. It has become almost impossible to get anything off the ground with a proper connection to business logic and challenges. Just recently the extend of this new take on the subject became even more obvious to me. One of my clients decided to start a parallel stream on organizational change in order to adjust formal role descriptions to address content accountability in the context of an intranet re-launch. That change will be necessary to ensure that the new service is able to generate the desired long-term impact and value.

1. Be unreasonably inspirational

Let me start with the last statement. I think it’s time to move away from measuring internal digital services like we used to measure external social media in the early days. It doesn’t matter how many people are part of a community, how many blogs are out there or how many likes a document gets. In order to understand the value generated through connecting people and intellectual assets we have to surface the impact of those connections: less time used to do the usual work, more business generated through inter-departmental knowledge exchange on a client, shorter time to market by taking previous experience (and failure!!) into account. For that we don’t really need the stretch vision. We need the commitment to change. We need executives and middle management to accept and name shortcomings in order to address them. We need baselines that progress and success can be measured against.

To get that commitment, internal change and the Digital Workplace need board attention as well. As soon as “digital” gets connected to currently “non-digital” business logic executive buy-in is required. Otherwise initiatives are “dead in the water” from the start. However, I am not sure if one person on the board that is really committed is enough. I wish that all board functions would take on their stake and responsibility in driving and leading change. I agree that most of the time you need one disruptive person that keeps questioning the status quo and acts as the catalyst for change. Nevertheless, operations, finance, HR, marketing…they all have to play an active role in the internal transformation because they all will be affected short, mid and long term.

2. Acquire capabilities

What this statements triggers with me first is the fight for talent and the pretty common perception that the Digital Natives are the ones that we have to satisfy to ensure the corporate future. As much as I agree with the first fact – if it comes to attracting talent the beauty contest now happens on the employer side – I am a little more careful with the second one.

Companies do need people that live connectedness and that have no fear to reach out and interact with large, unknown audiences. We need the ones that see the bigger picture and that will not understand why individual objectives should trump collaborative success. However, we have to build the bridge to today’s key protagonists in the corporate value chain. The ones that have been indoctrinated to think “me” first and disregard the potential of helping others if it doesn’t suit the personal – or even worse: the top manager’s – objectives. To change their way of thinking will take time. They ARE the industry experience. The HAVE the yearlong work and relationship management experience.

To connect that existing asset with the tremendous and almost infinite potential that lies within the future of information and knowledge work is the key for success. It’s the key for growth, profitability and competitive advantage.

3. Ring fence and cultivate talent

Hell NO! Please do not “ring fence” digital talent. Turn them into catalysts, into change agents, into relentless drivers and nurturers of change. Please. Don’t create internal silos and competition between connected and digitalized departments and the old fashioned “they way we have it done for the past 30 years” ones. The ultimate power for internal changes does not lie within competition. It lies in helping each other to transform and go new ways.

Hell YEAH! goes to the HR piece of the statement. Even though it might sound harsh, I have to admit that looking back to my career I haven’t come across that many HR departments that acted FOR talent instead of AGAINST cost. A lot of conversations around the subject even give me the confidence that this perception is only limited to me. Too many HR departments act too much on the R than on the H side. They have been turned into risk mitigation and process/policy enforcement departments. There aren’t that many HR departments out there that have a dedicated accountability to interfere with “business as usual” and make sure that talent is identified and grown – even if it means to re-allocate people because they were hired for the wrong job (not the wrong company!!).

In the age of internal digital transformation HR departments have to take on new responsibilities. They have to help existing talent to transform and new talent to balance their will to force change with the abilities of the organization. They have to find a way to identify the connectors, the spiders in the corporate network, the ones that have the ability to lead without a title. Then we will have an HR organization in place that is an integrative and essential part of the transformation of companies in truly digital enterprises.

4. Challenge everything

There we go. Basically I should just say: yes, exactly. Nevertheless I would like to elaborate a key learning of my past years in the field. If you talk to executives they are happy to look ahead. Their job is to pave the way to the future or rather line out the goal to which a path has to be paved out. If you talk to the work force – in particular the high performers – you will get serious buy in and will to change and break the old norms. Change is good. Tomorrow shall be brighter than today.

Resistance comes from middle management. That resistance however, shouldn’t be mistaken for being “not willing” or “incapable” to change and break norms. The “need for and momentum of change” simply reaches them. Their objectives stay function focused and KPI driven in order to make it easy for their superiors to evaluate the course and steer the boat. Sometimes you cannot blame anyone for really…because why would you make your life more complicated than actually necessary, right?

If we want to “change everything”, if we want to have a “plan covering every function”, if we want to break down silos and old norms of thinking we have to manage our organizations exactly according to that aspiration. Make “my” success impossible if “our” success is hindered by it. Formalize it. Turn individual goals and KPIs into collaborative measures and objectives throughout all levels. Don’t think quarterly EBIT, think long term knowledge retention and utilization. Don’t allow talent to trickle form the organization as soon as it becomes clear that the “human resource” will be the core of the next savings round. Rest assured: the ones that can swim and are able to reach the next shore are the ones to leave first if the boat is clearly going down. You are always left with the ones that couldn’t be bothered in the first place.

I know I am asking a lot here. But I’ve seen this change and new way of thinking happen and I believe that we will see it happen a lot more in the future.

Like this:

Another year has passed and it’s been an exciting one – what else. It would be weird to say that nothing has happened and that it has been rather dull. If nothing had happened on the professional front I could at least have reported that I have given up my Munich home base after 39 years to relocate to Switzerland.

But of course stuff has happened…

Over the past 12 months I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with people from various functions, industries, countries and age groups. In pure figures it looks a little like this:

My key learning from all the conversations, thought exchange and conceptual work in a nut shell.

1. Awareness for business productivity & effectiveness

Intranet and Digital Workspace are finally on their way (not there yet though) to be as important to companies as the digital tools connected to their actual business logic. The times where only ERP, CRM & Co. get executive attention seem to be over. Business productivity and effectiveness have moved much higher on the leadership and management agenda. However, the level of investment (aka long term commitment) in information and knowledge work isn’t yet matching the one for enforcing, standardising and improving process & task based work. It’s definitely on the right way but it’s still easier to bump the 120 Million to 135 for an SAP installation than to get 200 grand for a fully functioning prototype of an application that will affect people’s work every single day.

2. IT departments have acquired new terminology

For years IT and management publications have been writing about the re-positioning of the IT departments. It had been predicted that IT will move much closer to the business side of things and argue their value through contribution instead of cost reduction. In many instances I have experienced customer and user centric thinking, which had not just been fluffy marketing talk. The awareness that functionality and up-time don’t really cut it anymore is definitely there. A lot of IT managers have changed from “here is it all, pick what you want” to “we can do almost anything if you let us explicitly know what you are trying to achieve with what you’re asking from us”. Requirements engineering isn’t “feature evaluation” anymore. It’s become the “seeking to understand before seeking to be understood” in business IT.

Not ONE single client I have worked for had the “social intranet” vision anymore. It’s now about stealing with pride from all the successful services in the commercial world. The “conversation stream” has moved into the 2nd row on a lot of concept designs appreciated by business stakeholders.

The strongest competitor to e-mail is now a comprehensive and coherent concept for sending and receiving information. It’s less about “connecting the organisation” than about “enabling the individual to keep track of importance, urgency and interdependence”.

Concepts for notification, indication & orientation are becoming more and more important in order to make sure that users will find their way through the increasing jungle of communication & data.

4. The “enabling” intranet seems to be the one that might turn it into something work critical

When I am asked what my vision is for the future of intranets and the Digital Workplace my answer is usually:

The modern intranet or Digital Workplace has to be something that is work critical. It has to cause turmoil if you turn it off. It has to enable individuals to do their job with substantially less effort in order to unleash their potential for collaborative contribution. The modern intranet will make it easy to navigate through the continuously increasing complexity of today’s organisations. It will help people to overcome functional, geographical and hierarchical borders. It will create clarity, comfort and confidence for the every day work and become a motivating factor. It will be valuable.

“Enabling” people to do their job in confidence is an essential part of that vision. Have everything at hand that is required to create a proper foundation for individual success will be an important corner stone for collaborative contribution to corporate progress.

5. If you’re looking for the right anchor for the Digital Workplace…look out for a Lean Management initiative

One of my clients has directly connected the Digital Workplace with an initiative to introduce “Lean” to their organisation (aka continuous streamlining by everyone being in charge to identify areas for improvement). Another business contact has managed to connect the Digital Workplace to tightly to their business logic that parts of the business won’t be able to operate during a down time. I personally think that “Lean” is the right place for modern intranets and Digital Workplaces. It bridges individual enablement and collaborative exchange. It nurtures “us” thinking and creates awareness for the value that everyone can generate by just going through the work day with open eyes. The Digital Workplace can be the channel to collect, distribute, refine and implement everything that is required to be more “Lean”. I like the idea and I will pursue this more explicitly in 2015.

Now I am really curious what 2015 will bring…

Everybody take cover! Here’s an ad:

Even though I might be annoying my followers I would like to use this opportunity to (again) advertise the Digital Workplace Gold Dust white paper in which I have shared a lot of my insight an learning of the past years. If you can be dared please visit my employer’s website and request your personal copy…and sorry again…

I’ve been careful with promoting business related stuff on my personal blog. I will make an exception in this case because I have finally succeeded in collecting my past year’s experience in one place: the Digital Workplace Gold Dust. And I am proud of it (*BAM there, I said it)

It’s the follow up of Infocentric’s Digital Workplace Report and focuses on a fully practice based angle on the subject of Advanced Intranets and Digital Workplaces. It’s full of models, conceptual perspectives and references that I and we have used frequently and refined over the past years. I didn’t do this completely by myself of course. A lot of inspiration and input comes from my work for clients, the collaboration with valued colleagues and companions in the field.

Maybe you would enjoy the read 🙂 You can request a copy of the Digital Workplace Gold Dust on Infocentric’s website…

Like this:

On September 29/30 I’ve attended the Social Business Collaboration conference in Berlin. I believe it’s one of the best gatherings of the intl. and European advanced intranet and digital workplace community. It was a pleasure to meet so many friends and new folks that shared valuable insight and learning from the past year in the field. The level of honesty and candid talking is so impressive. I can only recommend to join that community if you want to meet people that share your challenges and might be able to (in the culture of social collaboration) develop ideas together.

Share further....

Like this:

In the June issue of the German LEAD digital (published by the Verlag Werben & Verkaufen, a subsidiary of the Sueddeutsche Verlag) you can find an article on the basics of social business. The essay contains references to my thinking around the change in leadership, work and collaboration culture as well as the challenges for change management and adaption.

The article was published in German. A link to the PDF can be found here or in the “publications” section of my site.

Special thanks to LEAD digital for the approval to publish this on my website!

Like this:

This year Santa decided to spoil Christmas for social business vendors and put a new player under the tree: Google+ (uhuu…surprise, innit!?) As reported by techcrunch.com (http://liten.be//ckd7t) Google is adding a new perspective to its (whoever you’re asking) slowly or steeply growing (not meant to be a) social platform. Just recently Google Germany’s Country Manager Dr. Stefan Tweraser stated at the Social Media Economy Days in Munich that Google+ isn’t (and never was meant to be) a social platform and therefore is not to be seen as a competitor to Facebook. One might get the impression that the new ‘it’s for businesses’ could be just a stun grenade trying to simply take away from the ground for arguing against the success of Google+.

However, I was suspecting this move for some time already (yes, you may call me Sherlock). Here’s why:

1. Google went the other way around than social software vendors

As stated in the paper on social business transformation strategies (http://liten.be//3T3RA) and this blog post on current social business scenarios (http://liten.be//k4Vsj) I am strongly suggesting to integrate “social” with the actual information and knowledge work. Part of that is of course the creation and manipulation of data and information. Yammer, VMware’s Socialcast, 37signal’s BaseCamp, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, IBM’s Connections or SAP’s StreamWork don’t offer sufficient(!) content creation and manipulation capabilities. Microsoft is in the process of somehow integrating it’s (not so social yet) SharePoint product with Office 356 making the use of desktop software for the majority of information worker’s task redundant – everything could happen in browser and cloud.

For Facebook integrating data creation and manipulation services that even remotely could satisfy business users seems like a proper stretch to me. I would dare to claim that’s not even on their road map.

Google is already there. It’s not fully integrated (yet) but definitely close enough. They even share the same top navigation already. The final marriage with the Google+ social layer is only a matter of connecting the loose ends.

2. E-mail won’t go away…and Google has e-mail right next to ‘social’

There are voices that predict the death of e-mail. I strongly disagree because I truly believe that re-channeling a lot of falsely e-mailed information to social channels, chat and audio/video will lead to a rebirth of e-mail. We will be able to use this asynchronous channel again without being forced to apply extensive organizational skills to separate spam from valuable information.

For the classic social software vendor’s e-mail is more something exotic (if not diabolic) and probably a turf they don’t want to creep on. For Microsoft and IBM it’s something they have created full blown multi-functional environments for (Outlook, Lotus)…and integrating all their bells and whistles with the social layer will be challenging even thought it might look pretty simple at first sight.

For Google it will be more than easy to blend Mail and the Google+ environment…

3. …and if you need it synchronized: even presence is there already with Google Talk

The magic of the synchronized channel of unified communication and collaboration lies in the element of presence information (green, yellow and red indicator). It’s the only way that a synchronous channel can work properly (even some worker’s union reps might think it was invented by the devil of control and big brotherhood). Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts neatly flavour the asynchronous environment with some real time interaction (with presence indication built in of course).

It’s much better that Facebook Chat which completely messes with your ‘asynchronous’ messaging (it’s driving me nuts…seriously) and at least as nice as e.g. SAP StreamWork’s on-site chat integration. Let’s see how long it will take Microsoft to deliver their OOB integration of SharePoint with Lync/Skype – whereas Google already has a stand alone client and the on-site availability throughout the entire ‘work’ environment (Google+ & Apps).

4. If you are the master of search and relevance…you will be the master of activating solution knowledge and expertise in the context of people’s challenges

One essential key to the success of information work is that we eventually are able to ramp up knowledge management that actually works. Putting information in boxes with standardized labels hasn’t worked so far and it never will. Never. Period.

Being able to match data that is created with existing information in real-time would be a huge benefit. Now put yourself in the shoes of an information worker and add the Google search experience to more or less all bits and pieces of your daily work. With an easy on/off button (don’t ask me how that’s gonna work) you will be able to have a little fairy by your side all day that offers relevant documents, wiki entries, blog posts or experts to what you’re just writing into your document, workspace or e-mail.

5. Collaboration – for real

Google Apps allows to conduct same time collaboration throughout their productivity suite. Something a lot of other vendors are still struggling with. It’s nevertheless an essential functionality for really collaborative content creation, manipulation and development. With Google it comes out of the box…erm…cloud straight away 🙂

6. Work local – work global

Google Translate…what else to I have to say?

7. If blogs and wikis are the super social features…oh well.

Google’s been there, done it and got the t-shirt.

….

I could go on forever because you can match literally everything from photos to videos and from maps to news in Google’s portfolio to peoper business use. The fact that it’s already totally integrated and was born in the cloud cannot be a disadvantage 🙂

Ever since the CIO of an industrial manufacturing company(!!) told me that moving their most precious asset (= intellectual property) to the cloud is only a matter of price I truly believe in the future of the cloud. As soon as the proprietary data center has only a tiny cable to the outside world it’s all the same anyway (well…at the end of the day it is…).

Let’s see how long it will take until Google will replace Microsoft in the majority of small and medium enterprises. I even believe that for some larger companies it should be a big challenge to migrate.

Follow me on Twitter

The Digital Sherpa

My name is Philipp Rosenthal and I work as a freelance digital business coach. My passion is to help people to discover the potential of digital for their business model and to shape successful initiatives. Over 20 years of experience in agencies, corporations & consulting companies provide me with a solid set of frameworks, methods and deep understanding for company & people dynamics.